Although some English women traveled to Virginia during the decade
after 1607, the colony remained largely a male outpost. Many of the
colonists, in the words of the Virginia Company's records, were
"enflamed wth a desire to returne for England only through the wants
of the Comforts of Marriage without wch God saw that Man could not
live contentedlie noe not in Paradize." The Company's officers
attributed some of the colony's difficulties to the absence of
women: "Hence have sprunge the greatest hinderances of this Noble
worke." The men "uppon esteeminge Virginia, not as a place of
habitation butt only of a short sojourninge: have applied themselves
and their labours wholly to the raysinge of present profitt, and
utterly neglected not onlie the Staple Commodities, but even the
verie necessities of Mans liffe."

Between 1619 and 1621 the Virginia Company sent
about 250 young English women to Virginia, explaining, “Wee therfore
judginge itt a Christian charitie to releive the disconsolate mindes
of our people ther, and a spetiall advancemt to the plantation, to
tye and roote the planters myndes to Virginia by the bonds of wives
and children.” [Virginia Company Records, 16 July 1621, Ferrar
Papers, Magdalene College, Cambridge University]

They
hoped to convert the colony into a functioning civil society. The
presence of women would change everything.

The
first books and articles on the history of Virginia's women focused
on elite white women in the home, as wives and mothers, educators of
children, and supervisors of households. Newer scholarship,
beginning with Anne Firor Scott's significant work The Southern
Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970), investigates the
intersections between women's personal, professional, and public
lives. The new scholarship also treats African Americans and white
women from lower classes, identifying many ways in which women
transcended stereotypes. The recent works exhibit the wide variety
of experiences of Virginia's women and how they changed over time.

Virginia women were involved in many aspects of public life long
before gaining the right to vote in 1920. Women were influential
leaders and diplomats in the Powhatan chiefdom. Their voices were
heard even without the franchise—in the seventeenth century, Lady
Frances Berkeley made Green Spring the headquarters for burgesses
and councillors who opposed the Crown’s policies, and in the
eighteenth Hannah Lee Corbin boldly proposed that women who paid
taxes be allowed to vote.

Women were energetic
volunteers and able fundraisers, sewing clothes for the needy,
raising money for orphanages, and supporting female missionaries.
They petitioned the General Assembly seeking legislative action,
financial aid, and divorce. As early as the 1840 presidential
election, they were active in political campaigns and participated
in debates on the most important issues of the day—among them
slavery, the public debt, and education. They penned letters to the
governor requesting pardons, appointments to office, and assistance.

It is no coincidence that after women won the vote
in 1920, city, county, and state governments in Virginia created or
expanded social service agencies, developed public health
departments, enlarged educational opportunities, and began to break
down the class and racial lines that had divided Virginians.